When it comes to cloud storage, let’s be real – you want it to be easy, secure and fast. After all, the decision to use a cloud storage provider is not taken lightly and when you do finally decide to forgo local data storage for the cloud, you want to be able to feel confident about your decision. That’s where TwinStrata (News - Alert) comes in.

“What we do is help companies expand their storage capacity using a choice of cloud providers,” Nicos Vekiarides, chief executive officer of TwinStrata, told TMCnet at Cloud Expo East 2012 this morning. “We really help them address the need for growing data whether it’s backup, archive, data replication or even storing some of their primary data elsewhere other than on premise. We enable tremendous cost savings and give them a way to store data that requires virtually no maintenance.”

The company, founded in 2007, offers its revered revolutionary CloudArray software that makes cloud storage as fast, safe and easy to access as local storage. A CloudArray virtual or physical appliance takes minutes to configure and integrates public cloud, private cloud and local or remote storage devices into flexible “Cloud SANs,” according to company officials.

TwinStrata also offers a family of software and hardware appliances geared for businesses of any size that offer off-site data protection; disaster recovery; business continuity; and instant data storage capacity expansion. But for TwinStrata, one of its key goals is explaining to people the importance of moving to the cloud and just how easy cloud storage can be.

“The most important thing that we are seeing is that the cost of maintaining IT infrastructure for most organizations is very high,” Vekiarides said. “About 70 percent of IT costs go into maintaining existing infrastructures and what businesses really want to do is provide better services to their customers. But, if only 30 percent of IT dollars can go to this, how can they do that when they spend all of their time and money maintaining existing infrastructure.”

“Cloud storage pushes all of that to the cloud provider,” he added. “For example, provisioning, data storage and daily backups can become automated and easier without any manual intervention. All of the operations contribute to the high maintenance burden, but with cloud we really take that away. We offload that from the administrator.”

For TwinStrata, there are a few cardinal ways that the cloud storage company continues to remain unique in the marketplace, the first being that it boasts a favorable user experience. With all of TwinStrata’s products, within minutes you can provision terabytes of information.

Customers can also choose from 16 cloud storage providers, enjoy unmasked flexibility, both hardware and software offerings, and flexible pricing.

TwinStrata also offers a “bring your own cloud” model, in which customers can buy any appliance from TwinStrata and use any of the 16 cloud providers it supports. Customers can choose from a range of services from simply connecting with a cloud provider to getting a cloud storage solution to getting a whole host of offerings.

Another way TwinStrata maintains its edge in the marketplace is through its ecosystem of solution partners. Through these partnerships, the company can provide full solutions that do auto-tiering, data offloading and streamlined IT solutions.

This morning at Cloud Expo, TwinStrata shed light about the importance of cloud storage during a session titled “Extending SANs to the Cloud: What the Data Storage Vendors Forgot.” The session covered the fact that while SANs have become the common dpelo9yment model for interconnecting data storage systems, administrators are now rethinking SAN and are casting an eye toward the cloud.

“The session highlighted what’s missing in today’s storage area networking implementation and how cloud fills that gap,” Vekiarides said. “It was about how you can use the cloud to augment your existing environment and in reality every storage environment can be augmented in cloud.”

“We are the enabling piece; we are the piece that makes it secure.”

As Cloud Expo wraps up today, TwinStrata hopes participants take away a few key points about the cloud storage company, including the fact that the company is always continuing to expand its platforms.

“I think the takeaway for a lot of organizations is right now a lot of them are scrambling to figure out how to leverage the cloud,” Vekiarides said. “In order to stay competitive, you do have to use the cloud because if other organizations are not spending as much time on maintenance then they have a competitive advantage.”

“We make it easy to use the cloud,” he said. “Where we see ourselves is that enabler – that piece that sits at every customer infrastructure that makes the cloud look and feel and function like local storage. We see ourselves as having the same type of impact as being the standard gateway to cloud storage that every organization will need.”